getting into tapestry

an experiment

Do you ever want to slip inside?

Shinny up a warp?

Lounge on some weft.

Crawl into the ephemeral expanse?

I do. I always have.

Of course once upon a time I wove myself in—and it worked a treat.¹

That was back in the days when I planned ahead.²

Back when it was second nature to build myself with weft.

These days—alas—by virtue of scale, sore hands, lack of foresight, evolving aesthetics, ungainly materials, elusive dreams, new ways of seeing or what have you—that mode of entry is proving elusive.

I can feel the loss—sometimes mourn it—mourn it, that is, until I remember that I now have access to a medium I lacked back then.

So what if…³

To be sure over the years I’ve embroidered my self into tapestries, painted her onto on hand woven fabric,⁴ and even drawn ladders to painted tapestries on scraps of old gessoed pillowcase (whatever it takes to get in).⁵

But until this week I’d not tried all three together with tapestry as the ground.

In retrospect, I think it was a bit much. In fact at this scale, I’m not sure the stitching added anything beyond the pleasure of stitched lines on the back.⁶

But nothing ventured, no information gained, eh?

And it was fun to chase the idea all the way in.

To leap before we looked.⁷

It’s not like anyone else would see it.⁸

And aren’t these messy experiments all part of the crazy, wild, fun, edgy and creative life we are trying to live?

Isn’t this why we try the same super simple and infinitely complex things again and again and again?

And however it turns out, who can resist trying yet again—just in case, with luck and an open mind, it might be possible to get into the same familiar place in a whole new way.⁹

1. Well, weaving imagery into tapestry is kind of the point of the medium, which naturally makes this other stuff I’m trying feel somewhat irreverent. Almost cheeky. But what can I do? Chagrined I may sometimes be, but the muse is ever her audacious and saucy self.

2. Back when I thought ahead and worked on a slightly larger scale, that is…

3. Functional tapestry: weft faced plain weave as support for/in collaboration with ink and paint and/or stitches.

4. I’ve long been inspired by the work of Sue Prince who works with egg tempera and natural pigments on gessoed woven cloth—usually linen or heavy cotton using a Swedish technique called Bonad. I find her paintings really appealing and have long wondered about applying this technique (or a watercolor variation, at least for now) to tapestry. So here I go!

5. Stitching on Tapestry: A Short Guide to an Experiment and Old Friend Came A Courtin’

6. I was pleased with last week’s Baba Yaga house machine stitched into tapestry and hope to try just that again at some point. In the midst of an idea storm however (my own hurricane Beryl), pausing to refine just one technique feels a bit stifling. Also, when I’m on the track of something that feels new I find it helpful to make a pile of mistakes right away: find out which processes I like, which are not fun (or hurt my hands), which don’t suit the medium, which need more time and care etc. Not exactly the scientific method to be sure (change one variable at a time)—but I’m not after the scientific method. Rather I’m after the exhilaration and mess of learning. It’s often disappointing. It’s also, at least for a time, somehow unstoppable. So what can a person do? As Anna Brones said the other day (in the comments of a post of hers), about being in the throes of idea evolution: it helps to treat yourself like a five year old. In other words, throw yourself wholeheartedly in to whatever it is— take a nap—thenget up and do it again.

Speaking of Anna Brone and learning, tomorrow (Wednesday the 10th of July), she is holding another one of her Wednesday free workshops : Life in Color: Building a Power Palette Creative Workshop with Alexis Joseph and Anjelika Deogirikar Grossman .

And Speaking of Palettes, Rebecca Mezoff’s last two Blog Posts on color have been most intriguing. The first is about a tool called Palette Scout, which, though I’ve neither seen nor tried it in person, looks most intriguing. The second is about her recent workshop and is called Designing Palettes for Tapestry Weaving.

And one last thing while on the topic of color in general—a friend just showed me the super cool kid’s book Before Colors: where pigments and dyes come from byAnnette Bay Pimentel and illustrator Madison Safer, and I’m just so tickled to see the spread of information about the myriad natural sources of color— this time for kids! It joins Found and Ground by the amazing Caroline Ross and Book Of Earth by Heidi Gustafson. Oh! I just noticed that Before Colors and Book of Earth are both published by Abrams so wonder if the one influenced the other? Interesting…

7. It is astonishing to me how “on the edge” a person can feel with a few yards of someone else’s discarded yarn stash, a few bits of used paper and the odd plant stem.

8. You excepted, of course.

9. And that reminds me of the book, On Looking: A Walker’s Guide to the Art Of Observation by Alexandra Horowitz, which is part of The Big Amazing Read —a cool thing Mike Sowden is doing on his Substack Everything is Amazing. I’ve just started to read Horowitz’s introduction on Threadable, the app Mike’s using for the big amazing read and honestly, how NOT to be compelled —writing about taking the same walk with a different point of view time and again.

And that’s quite enough links and footnotes for one hot summer day, isn’t it? Unless a cool dark rabbit hole linked to another cool breezy rabbit holes, and another one after that, is just what you need. Or, if you’re in a different hemisphere than I (it’s heading up to 100 F here today), perhaps a warm and cozy rabbit hole sounds like just the thing… Then again, now that I’m using that metaphor I realize I’d rather think of all these ideas as prairies where a person can meander at will in any direction they choose. No confining tunnels or walls or paths from which you cannot stray if the mood strikes.

Oh for goodness sake Sarah. Just hit send and be done with it!